さくらさくら Review

DAMNED. After playing this, I realised one thing. I WANT THE MERCHANDISE. ARRRRGGGGG.

悪霊退散悪霊退散悪霊退散悪霊退散悪霊退散悪霊退散悪霊退散悪霊退散悪霊退散悪霊退散

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO…………….

Ok, back to the topic, this is a very fun eroge to play with lots of cute systems, awesome characters and hilarious events. I haven’t heard many good things about Oni-Uta which I plan to play next. If so, I think Sakura Sakura may be the best one this month for me.

Official

Getchu

Walkthrough

Some Rubbish Infomation

Company = ハイクオソフト

Scenario = たとむ, keikei (Yotsunoha)

Artist = カスカベアキラ(Yotsunoha), 緋賀ゆかり, 木谷椎（Xsara）

Genre =  School life romance

What’s so special = Dual protagonists, Very nice art, Lip-Sync, Blinking eyes, Wonderfully cute and innovative systems, Characters that make you nosebleed.

Foreword

First eroge off the june releases. Wasn’t bad at all. I haven’t been hearing good things about Oniuta but still, I’m going to be playing that next. Hoping that it turns out all right.

Company

The company that’s famous for one of the most popular eroges in the industry, Yotsunoha.  Sakura Sakura is it’s 2nd work. Surprisingly, they managed to churn this out after one year of delays, the fact that makes most people irritated. Their specialty lies in pure romance it seems and it seems like comedy is not too hard for them either. I don’t know if I would bother keeping watch though, they make eroges pretty slowly.

Story

So we go.

Let’s just go with the setting since the prologue is LONG. VERY LONG.

Like I said this has double protags so it’s going to get a little messy.

Touru, a mysterious transfer student that suddenly transferred into this school. Rumors have it that he’s a rich and high class prince.

He, however, expects to live a normal life (a rosy one actually) in this school. He doesn’t a shitload of cash with him, neither does has acts like someone from the upper levels of society.

Then he gets the news, the place he’s staying in isn’t the high class dorm that everyone is at!He gets lead to…… a worn down dorm. NO WAI! Well then he gets shamelessly extorted but let’s leave that alone.

A girl drops from the roof of the worn down dorm, he runs over and catch her. Romantically 姫抱っこ！Then the girl tells him, she’s his teacher! and the person in charge of the dorm. What would happen now…

I know I know that’s a rather rubbish translation but I’m too bored right now lol.

I have no idea, whether this eroges has more romance or comedy. Seriously. The obstacles that they “face” are mostly 痴話喧嘩s and it’s normally extremely funny. Though it doesn’t bridge over to slapstick.

The story itself is just the life about a guy falling in love with a girl in school. Really. Of course there are stuff like clubs that take up quite some portion of the story, but if you sum it up, that’s what you’ll get. It’s not a bad thing. Reading this didn’t bore me one bit.

Ok, for the dual protag part, you start with Touru, but after you finished Nanako’s and Sakura’s FIRST ending, you’ll unlock the two routes for the other two girls Kurumi and Akira from Naoki (the otaku erogamer that’s a friend of Touru’s) point of view. I found Naoki’s girls were a lot less in story and they tried cramming a lot of H scenes into the eroge, which was kinda a turn off for me.

Oh, and I almost forgot. If you go to Kurumi’s route, it’ll assume Touru is dating Sakura and if you go to Akira’s it’ll be Nanako.

I personally liked the dual protag idea since it’s interesting to have two different personalities interacting with each other and you can see them in a first person point of view.

Another point, the protags in this story are DUMB. REALLY DUMB. I lost count of how many times I almost hit my face on the wall when there was such an obvious chance to confess. Really. If I did, the wall would be red in color by now.

To be honest, the 1st run was the most incredible one. The others were pretty good too, but the first is definately the best so choose wisely whether you want Nanako or Sakura. I calculated around 7 runs to clear the entire eroge.

The endings were all extremely satisfying IMO and solved everything (if there was anything to solve in the first place). For a pure romance eroge, the story is superb and I can say from the bottom of my heart that this eroge has a very solid plot for a pure romance eroge.

Characters

稲葉徹 (Inaba Touru)

He’s faceless in the eroge if you’re in his POV btw.

Naoki’s a kind hearted idiot. No really. He loves girls a lot. You know what that means. He’s the kind that if he gets serious, he gets 99X the power than his usual self. He wants to join the art club a lot. Still, he has a huge secret. One you’re going to have to uncover yourself.

桜　菜々子 (Sakura Nanako)

ZOMG PINK HAIR. She’s a teacher in 麟徳学園 and the dorm mother (in charge of the dorm) of 月見荘, the worn down dorm. Also the teacher in charge of the sport-oriented clubs. She wakes everyone with a warm smile and cooks for them, though only Naoki eats it. A little strict. She gardens and does all the housework. Awesome character. Too bad she’s a little too much on the loli side for me even though she’s actuall pretty old.

She’s absolutely cute when she’s pouting.

桐島 さくら (Kirishima Sakura)

(/0_0)/ さくら！

My favourite character. She’s a tsundere (pretty obvious). The vice president of the art club. Was pretty cold to Touru at first. She changed a little after an event though. As you can see she has huge, absolutely huge assets. She’s extreme in her dere mode and when she blushes, it’s just… heaven.

See what I mean

布施直樹 (Fuse Naoki)

The 2nd protag. Good friends with Touru. He’s a fully fledged otaku. He skips classes regularly for eroges and delve into the virtual world a lot (I don’t think I’m that bad yet =/). He likes cracking lame jokes and acts like a fool, but he’s actually a pretty serious guy. Neither is he actually dumb (when it comes to love he is though).

立花 くるみ (Tachibana Kurumi)

Another loli. Sigh. She’s Naoki’s net friend. She used to be a hikikomori, but it seems like she cured that. Bright, cheerful and absolutely childish. She likes candy (I forgot what kind). Also in the art club.  She likes Naoki a lot..It’s so obvious that it’s not funny. Total enemies with Akira.

She is cute though no doubt about that.

新田 晶 (Nitta Akira)

Why don’t they ever make characters with personalities like this without the ridiculous huge boobs. In any case, she’s a tsundere too. She’s not the cold kind, but rather the fiery kind. Kinky. She does aerobics. Naoki’s childhood friend. Her famous move is her knee attacks which has been refined through her many uses on Touru and Naoki.

As you can see, Sakura Sakura has very interesting and likable characters who are bound to make to laugh.

System

Koff koff system time.

Before you start, please update to v1.1 which fixes some sound bugs apparently.

Sakura Sakura had a lot of fun systems to play with which I’ll go through one by one.

The title screen changes a total of 4 times after the endings. And yes you start with all the stuff like CG mode and Sound mode available to you.

See? Also, there’s the updates that scroll by on the bottom left hand corner informing you updates to your CG, sound and item lists. A very nice touch.

The system covers all the usual settings and you can change the usual keys for stuff like skip, auto and closing the text box. Not in this picture though.

Oh and the whole theme of the eroge is a mixture of red and pink, so people who don’t really like that would find it a headache (*points to Zen*). It fits the theme nicely though, so I have no problems with it.

The CG mode and Recollection mode for this eroge is merged together. So yes, just click on the heart below the CG and you can relive the moment of that CG. Awesome idea isn’t it? Not to mention the layout is very innovative and scrolling through the tabs gives smooth transitions. Also, hovering your mouse over the CG would give a short summary of the event on the top left, but I forgot to do that XD.

As I said, this eroge is split up into quite some parts. So after your first run, you’ll be greeted by something like this when you click start. It’s a really nice touch and very easy to know what is what too.

I bet you’re all wondering what the record mode is about. No it’s not about recording your play time if that’s what you’re thinking.

It’s a system that records the items you picked up while playing the eroge. It may be a piece of paper, a piece of kendo armor, a picture of the girls, character bio, op and ending movies. In short, it’s everything else. Do not, however, miss out this piece of the system since there are some stories hidden in this mode and checking the new ones you uncovered could reveal more recollections and cgs.

The sub route menu is some small stories you get when you unlock them from one other system which I’ll get to later. It’s all hilarious stories more than romance stuff.

Now, time for the text box. As you can see it’s white on….. red bordered white text. It’s not exactly hard to read, but not very easy either. Still, it fits too well in the theme for me to complain. There’s also the faces on the left side that shows all the emotions of the sentence they’re saying now.

The bar below fades away when your cursor is not hovering on it, but for explanation’s sake I made it visible. As you can see, all of the buttons you need are there.

They merged the save and load system together which is pretty convenient. You get pretty big thumbnails too, which helps a lot. You can never have more of big thumbnails.

Like I said there’s a very special system. And that’s what you can see here. You can go into different rooms or interact with some items on different scenes while playing this. There is quite a variety of things that happens here. Sometimes another person follows you sometimes it’s just them running around. This is also where you collect your subroutes. The red color rooms or items means the important things you should do, but on some cases not going to them and doing something else unlocks a subroutine.

And every choice here does affect the routes you’re going to so take note of what you’re doing.

There is also an innovative way of showing whose route you’re leaning towards.

Ta da~. Yes it’s a see saw! as you can see, the more you please them, the more the see-saw will lean towards you. So you can use this to gauge your choices. It appears quite a lot throughout the story so don’t worry about checking this a lot.

There I think I covered everything about the systems.

CG and Animations

One very important thing about the cgs. First thing, the characters blink. Yes even in the cgs. Also they lip sync. YES ALSO IN THE CG. AWESOME YES?

There’s a decent lot of cgs and they all look absolutely awesome. The color themes and all are fabulous. I would get this eroge for the style alone.

Just one thing, why did they draw the eyes under the hair. It’s creepy. Just a little.

The SDs were hilarious. Really. I lost count of how many times I just burst out of laughter.

Problem, you get faceless protags. Oh well. Nothing you can change about that.

Music

The cg mode had a very nice interface. When you clicked the songs, a disc would come up and spin slowly while a character would walk on top of it. Talk about cute.

The music was actually pretty lively and fun, which totally is what this eroge is all about. There are 3? i think songs in this eroges for the ops and eds. Fun songs. Really fun.

I’m playing the soundtrack right now =D

H scenes

There’s around 4 scenes for every heroine.

I need to state this again, in the H scenes they still lip sync. LIP SYNC. YES. AND THEY BLINK.

Awesome. And both Touru and Naoki are total スケベs so you can expect lotsa action. Everywhere. In all kinds of clothing. The voices were pretty good though I didn’t like Kurumi’s. So yes, this is definately very good material.

Last Word

This eroge was a very fun ride till the end. I’ve been playing too much actiony eroges and I almost forgot how fun pure love eroges are. This should definately be on everyone’s list this month. With awesome systems and cute characters, what other reasons do you need?

Screenies